Which route to elite turnover leads to women's political empowerment in developing countries?

It's commonly accepted that policymakers should promote women's inclusion for a more inclusive society. Drawing from the literature on democratic and non-democratic routes of elite turnover, this study analyses the effects of elite turnover on women's political empowerment (WPE) by comparing two main routes: political alternation and internal conflict. We measure WPE by using women's political empowerment index (WPEI) from the varieties of democracy database. Based on a large sample of 128 developing countries over the period 1980–2021, the ordinary least square fixed effect and Driscoll-Kraay fixed effects estimations show that elite turnover has a positive and statistically significant impact on WPE. Similar evidence is found when decomposing the WPEI in its sub-indices notably women's political participation, civil society participation, and women's civil liberties sub-indices. This result is also supported by the view that elite turnover increases education, as well as the institutional environment which therefore enables WPE. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques including the system generalized method of moments and two-stage least squares (GMM and IV 2SLS). Furthermore, the results remain unchanged when considering the majority of the geographical locations of our sample (it is insignificant for the MENA region) and the role of decentraliszation.